Personalize, target marketing campaigns across brands

ERGO Insurance Group centralizes CRM so all brands function as one

With multiple brands and lines of business functioning within one aggregated company, ERGO Insurance Group needed a way to not only personalize its customer service, but deliver more targeted marketing campaigns. The company achieved its goals using SAS® for Campaign Management.

Before implementing SAS, ERGO found it difficult to integrate enterprisewide sales and marketing strategies; campaigns and customer programs were separate entities at its Hamburg-Mannheimer, Victoria, DVK and DAS insurance companies.

Customers … do not want to be overwhelmed with information they do not need. That is exactly what we can ensure in the future, which gives us a decisive competitive advantage.

Christian Radtke
Head of CRM

In addition, the various lines of business had not been integrated, so it was impossible to create marketing campaigns or communications specific to individual customers.

"In many areas of the company, people thought more in terms of policies and not from the customer's perspective. There was no other way to do it," says Christian Radtke, Head of CRM for Marketing at ERGO. "We knew a lot about our customers, but we weren't able to integrate or access that knowledge."

Know the right offer

With a centralized CRM system in place, ERGO uses SAS® Enterprise Miner™ for predictive analytics and data mining required to target customers with the right offers.

"Customers have their own service needs," says Radtke. "One would like more contact with his insurance company, another likes less. SAS revealed this insight to us."

Based on valuable customer information, Radtke and his team can deliver services and promotions most suitable for specific customers, such as direct-mail campaigns, customer-service calls or visits from field representatives.

Focus on individuals

Five CRM experts at ERGO use SAS to help the sales and marketing teams coordinate actions that encompass each brand and line of business.

Analysts identify customers based on their preferences, values and termination probabilities, allowing ERGO to make the optimal customer-to-campaign assignments.

The key is to focus on the individual customer – not the planned promotion. With this method, the system calculates a customer's affinity for a specific product or service, as well as the channel through which ERGO can best reach that customer.

"We work according to the principle of 'next best offer'," Radtke says. "That means we always search for the perfect offer to present to our customer."

Avoid duplication

Not only does SAS allow for customized marketing campaigns, it also minimizes duplicate offers; a customer who has already received a specific offer from one brand does not receive a second offer from another brand. Thus, the different brands function as one.

"Customers expect a differentiated response, and they do not want to be overwhelmed with information they do not need," Radtke says. "That is exactly what we can ensure in the future, which gives us a decisive competitive advantage."

ERGO's slogan is "Insuring means understanding." With SAS, ERGO now has a whole new understanding of its customers.

"The better we know our customers and their needs, the better we can align our services with them," says Radtke. "SAS provides very important assistance in that process. I am not aware of any other [customer intelligence] software that manages large quantities of data while providing excellent and differentiated analyses."

Challenge

Personalize and target marketing campaigns across brands.

Solution

Benefits

Offers aligned with customer needs and preferences, brands do not send duplicate offers, different brands function as one.

The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular situations, business models, data input, and computing environments described herein. Each SAS customer’s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. SAS does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for SAS products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with SAS as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following a successful implementation of SAS software. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.